Island ecosystem health in the context of human activities with different types and intensities

2021 ◽  
Vol 281 ◽  
pp. 125334
Author(s):  
Yuan Chi ◽  
Dahai Liu ◽  
Wenxiu Xing ◽  
Jing Wang
2006 ◽  
Vol 41 (3) ◽  
pp. 307-315 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mary E. Power ◽  
Dana Sotornik ◽  
Marcel D.O. Pinheiro ◽  
Vivian R. Dayeh ◽  
Barbara J. Butler ◽  
...  

Abstract Bacterivory by ciliates in various water ecosystems, both natural and artificial, plays a significant role on the microbial population composition and consequently affects water quality. A convenient, rapid and inexpensive methodology to evaluate the capacity of the ciliate protozoan Tetrahymena thermophila for bacterivory was developed utilizing fluorescent protein expressing bacteria (FPEB) in a microtitre plate fluorimeter. Bacterivory was correlated with a loss in fluorescence measured in the fluorimeter and confirmed by fluorescence microscopy showing that the FPEB were engulfed during the assay and subsequently lost their fluorescence, whereas Cytochalasin B, a known inhibitor of phagocytosis, prevented a decrease in relative fluorescence units (RFUs). The ciliate bacterivory (CB) assay has a great dynamic range allowing the assay to be performed with a variety of predator:prey concentrations. A model toxicant, CuCl2, known to have a toxicological impact on protozoa and often present in different types of wastewater, resulted in measurable decreases in bacterivory. As well, starvation of Tetrahymena for 24 h resulted in reduced bacterivory. In the future, the CB assay could be developed for water monitoring purposes to rapidly assess water samples for the capacity to support bacterivory as an indicator of ecosystem health.


Sensors ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 19 (19) ◽  
pp. 4119 ◽  
Author(s):  
Alexander Diete ◽  
Heiner Stuckenschmidt

In the field of pervasive computing, wearable devices have been widely used for recognizing human activities. One important area in this research is the recognition of activities of daily living where especially inertial sensors and interaction sensors (like RFID tags with scanners) are popular choices as data sources. Using interaction sensors, however, has one drawback: they may not differentiate between proper interaction and simple touching of an object. A positive signal from an interaction sensor is not necessarily caused by a performed activity e.g., when an object is only touched but no interaction occurred afterwards. There are, however, many scenarios like medicine intake that rely heavily on correctly recognized activities. In our work, we aim to address this limitation and present a multimodal egocentric-based activity recognition approach. Our solution relies on object detection that recognizes activity-critical objects in a frame. As it is infeasible to always expect a high quality camera view, we enrich the vision features with inertial sensor data that monitors the users’ arm movement. This way we try to overcome the drawbacks of each respective sensor. We present our results of combining inertial and video features to recognize human activities on different types of scenarios where we achieve an F 1 -measure of up to 79.6%.


1994 ◽  
Vol 79 (3) ◽  
pp. 1139-1149
Author(s):  
Richard W. Kilby

It is suggested that interests have been taken for granted by psychologists and deserve recognirion because they are important in our lives. Different types of interests have different natures and origins and this brief report is limited to intellectual interests. They are described as combining two uniquely human activities—an ever-reaching-out intellect and an emotional coloring which is giving them significance. A consequence is that new interest, with its motivation, is being produced spontaneously and regularly. A number of specific interest-influencing determinants are mentioned and exemplified with brief reports on the interests of some biological and anthropological scientists.


Author(s):  
Mohit Sharma ◽  
R Sivaperumal

The surface water forms the lifeline of almost all the human activities. The water pollution, inflow of solid waste, dumping of garbage in the drains and eroded soil, silt deposited in the natural drainage are major threat to surface water. The studies focusing on the assessment of changes in the river hydrology, morphology and water quality. The methodology used in the study involved assessment of Ghaziabad district water quality from six different locations for a period of one year 2016-17 in monsoon, winter and summer seasons. The parameters observed are Temperature, pH, Turbidity, Total Hardness (T-H), Calcium Hardness.


2015 ◽  
Vol 2015 ◽  
pp. 1-9 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hyesuk Kim ◽  
Incheol Kim

We propose a system that can recognize daily human activities with a Kinect-style depth camera. Our system utilizes a set of view-invariant features and the hidden state conditional random field (HCRF) model to recognize human activities from the 3D body pose stream provided by MS Kinect API or OpenNI. Many high-level daily activities can be regarded as having a hierarchical structure where multiple subactivities are performed sequentially or iteratively. In order to model effectively these high-level daily activities, we utilized a multiclass HCRF model, which is a kind of probabilistic graphical models. In addition, in order to get view-invariant, but more informative features, we extract joint angles from the subject’s skeleton model and then perform the feature transformation to obtain three different types of features regarding motion, structure, and hand positions. Through various experiments using two different datasets, KAD-30 and CAD-60, the high performance of our system is verified.


2017 ◽  
Vol 551 ◽  
pp. 470-483 ◽  
Author(s):  
C.S. Zhao ◽  
S.T. Yang ◽  
H.T. Zhang ◽  
C.M. Liu ◽  
Y. Sun ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Vol 29 (2) ◽  
pp. 71-80
Author(s):  
Dobromir Dobrev ◽  
Vladimir Dobrev ◽  
Dimitar Demerdzhiev

Abstract The Eastern Imperial Eagle (EIE) is a large-sized, globally threatened species with a wide distribution. The species is extremely vulnerable and sensitive to human disturbance and activities in the vicinities of its nests. We analyzed the effect of human disturbance in two territories of Eastern Imperial Eagles from Bulgaria in 2008–2009. We recorded 375 cases of different types of human activity in the vicinities of the two surveyed nests – 60 cases in nest A and 315 in nest B. The most common activity around the studied nests was the passing of light motor vehicles (n=100 cases). Our results highlight that the probability of EIE’s reaction is dependent on the type of activity, distance from the nest and the duration of the activity. However, eagles’ reaction is independent from the number of intruders. We found that with the decrease of the distance to the nest, the reaction progresses and is more acute. We found statistical differences between the distance belts and the majority of alert and flight reactions that were recorded at distances up to 300 m from the nests. We reported that humans walking around nests (mainly hunters, fishermen, tourists, people illegally extracting sand in the close vicinities of the nests) result in a large number of reactions of flight off by the eagles thus, leaving the nest unattended. More research on a large scale on this topic is needed including more accurate measures to address human disturbance in EIE territories. The findings will be applied to ensure higher breeding rates and species conservation.


Rangifer ◽  
2003 ◽  
Vol 23 (1) ◽  
pp. 21 ◽  
Author(s):  
Kjetil Flydal ◽  
Ingrid Rogstad Kilde ◽  
Per S. Enger ◽  
Eigil Reimers

There has been concern about possible effects of noise from power lines on reindeer (Rangifer tarandus tarandus) behaviour. Based on recent establishment of the reindeer audiogram and measurements of corona noise from two power lines of 300 kV and 420 kV, we found that reindeer are able to hear noise from power lines at frequencies above 250 Hz. A comparison with the human audiogram shows that humans are better able to perceive noise from power lines than reindeer, at least at the lowest frequencies. By simple comparisons of this kind, the perception of different types of sound by reindeer can be determined. Possible noise disturbances from human activities and constructions can be minimised if the intensity can be reduced for frequencies in the best hearing range of reindeer.


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